Amiga Turns 20

20 years ago on July 23rd the Commodore Amiga was unveiled at the Lincoln Centre in New York. For the launch Commodore had hired Andy Warhol & Debbie Harry (lead singer of Blondie) to demonstrate the Amiga’s graphics capabilities. Despite many dificulties the Amiga is still around today both as a company and as a community.

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Commodore crippled the Amiga from day one by giving it 256K RAM. Then a few years later, when they turned the Amiga into a C64 (“it’s so cheap you can’t afford NOT to buy one!”) with a whopping 512K. By 1992 Commodore got the Amiga up to 1Mb RAM (the A600) which was going to be “the C64 of the 1990s”. Shows how clueless Commodore was.

That was the Commodore engineers way of “cost reducing” a system: RAM crippling it. If a program required 1Mb RAM and the Amiga only had 512K, then there was no way you were going to run even that one program, much less take advantage of the multitasking OS.

Whatever the entry level machine is in a product line, that has to be the target system for developers, otherwise they are only aiming at a small subset of the potential market. Commodore essentially planted the seeds of the Amiga’s failure from day one. Too bad they used their C64/VIC-20 “8-bit engineers” to work on a machine with a minicomputer OS (tripos) developed by PhD computer scientists. Commodore was totally lost.

If they’d had even one Linus Torvalds in the company to keep the OS alive then there still could be something like the Amiga today. Instead there has only been 15 years of vaporware (Pios, Scala, VisiCorp, etc, etc)

Best description of what Commodore did with the Amiga: “It was not that they were first and took it, but that they were last and no one wanted it.”

And for the A1200 developers had to choose from more ram or better sound, they choosed more ram.

If only we would have seen AAA, the ABox or even Amiga MMC + QNX neutrino based os

2005-07-23 8:25 pm

Well…AmigaOne is pretty much what MCC was supposed to be; a new Amiga model

The only difference is, for once Amiga Inc decided not to act like a bunch of idiots and released the product just as a standard-compatable motherboard.

2005-07-23 8:44 pm

> That was the Commodore engineers way of “cost reducing”

> a system: RAM crippling it. If a program required 1Mb

> RAM and the Amiga only had 512K, then there was no way

> you were going to run even that one program, much less

> take advantage of the multitasking OS.

Of course this is pure bullshit. The engineers never wanted to “cost reduce” or “cripple” anything. They were in no position to decide this either. It was the companies sales and marketing people who were clueless and wanted to “cost reduce” everything. The sales and marketing people are no engineers to say it that way. You should read up some historical information if you can, specially a throughout interview with Jay Miner.

I remember being at college and using DOS and early versions of Windows (version 2 or 3?) and then coming home to my Amiga a multi-tasking, multimedia powerhouse. It was like stepping 10 years into the future.

I also remember going to a show and seeing the Amiga 1000 being demoed with SideCar (the IBM PC addition). Again, watching IBM programs running on the same screen (well, same physical screen given the Amiga’s clever display tricks) as Amiga programs was amazing.

I always thought that the problem with Commodore was that new custom chipsets cost a lot of money and Commodore didn’t have it. So in a way the custom chipsets that made the Amiga great also led to it’s demise in one sense (at least that’s how I remember things; feel free to correct me).

I don’t think I’ll ever see a PC launched again that was so far ahead of its time.

P.S. Anyone know why the sliding screen trick with the Copper hardware hasn’t been picked up by graphics card companies – I still think it’s rather neat, even now.

In those days I had an Atari ST because I prefered the razor sharp black and white screen above the interlaced mode on the Amiga. I am curious, is the Amiga OS still competative in 2005 and what are its strengths?

Enjoy your systems.

2005-07-23 10:57 pm

I still remember the Amiga commercials with Tommy Lasorda from when I was a kid. I always wondered what was so great about them, having never owned one.

Anyway, just a curious question to any current Amiga users: does it still have anything worthwhile not implemented yet in other systems? We know it was advanced for it’s time, but is there still anything in it?

Well, there are quite a few new things in AmigaOS4, but no technological advances exist in it that you can’t really find in other OS’es. Right now it’s still playing catch-up. What makes it different is still how it’s implemented, that is, with incredible elegance and simplicity. The OS is still as easy and straight forward to handle as it was back then. I think it’s one of the few major OS’es out there, where you can really get out into the corners and learn its architecture in a few days.

That way, if something goes wrong, you don’t have to rely on repair tools or programs in the system to keep it running (like Windows File Protection), but you can go straight in and fix it yourself. The system is very open and honest.

The simplicity also makes it fast. No, ridiculously fast. 🙂 Warm reboots take 4-6 seconds, it multitasks smoothly on even slow hardware. Programs start in less than a second and are very responsive.

Oh and then there are assigns. 🙂

Those three things are the current strength of AmigaOS4. When it gets done some time later this year, they’ll focus more on things to put on top of it for 4.1 to get a richer experience. Among those will most likely be a rewritten Workbench, support for DirectX9b level 3D called NOVA, proper surround audio, supporting more PPC platforms and better developer tools.

2005-07-24 11:51 am

True (multi-assigns and other stuff).

And there are a lot of little things you can’t do on a WinXP but they are not important so I won’t talk about them.

@All

Remember that AmigaOS 4.0 is just the first step, and it already kicks asse. 4.1 will be far better.

2005-07-24 3:21 pm

@Ronald Vos:

> Anyway, just a curious question to any current Amiga

> users: does it still have anything worthwhile not

> implemented yet in other systems? We know it was

> advanced for it’s time, but is there still anything

> in it?

Let’s see…

– You still have multiple screens with different resolutions that open and close on demand.

– You still have the dynamic (as big as its content) Ram Disk as a nice and fast alternative for a temp dir.

– You still have Arexx, a very easy to learn script language that can be used for macros or interconnectivity between programs.

– You still have the nice os directory structure that is easy to understand. Not everything in one directory or cryptic file and directory names.

– Datatypes: Load new graphics formats into old drawing programs. Just install a datatype for the format and every program that supports datatypes (i.e. every program 🙂 will be able to load your file.

– New in OS4: Audio tracks on cd’s appear as aiff files in the cd directory. Just copy them to your hard disk or load them into your favourite music player or use lame directly on these files…

– The whole picture: The above features, a nice usb mass storage support (put stick in->a new disk icon appears,pull it out->the icon vanishes), a nice cd/dvd mount rainier support, the nice shell, the extremely configurable user interface, the assigns, the devices (e.g. “copy soundfile to audio:” will play the file), the localisation system and what I have forgotten.

2005-07-24 10:38 pm

heh.. beos has a lot of that

-up to 32screens each with different resolutions, color depths etc

-audio CD tracks are seen as wavs that you can directly manipulate

-datatypes

I think for vanilla x86, beos is as close to an updated amigaOS as you can get

(not counting aros)

2005-07-24 12:04 am

…. but I al selling up my amiga stuff. If you’re in the UK, you may be lucky.

I worked as an Amiga tech in a store and I can tell you what killed the Amiga was the cheapskate userbase.. The average Amiga user was a guy with an Amiga a Courier HST 19.2 modem and a lot of blank floppies.

There were not anough Videotoaster users to save the company.

2005-07-24 12:48 pm

I worked as an Amiga tech in a store and I can tell you what killed the Amiga was the cheapskate userbase.. The average Amiga user was a guy with an Amiga a Courier HST 19.2 modem and a lot of blank floppies.

There were not anough Videotoaster users to save the company.

>

>

What killed the Amiga was people like you who thought that *WERE* people who were all that interested in the Videotoaster to begin with.

A nice device, but all for few the people who actually had a use for it all it amounted to was pretty much an expensive toy.

You must one of the dorks who run around blaming the decline of the PC Gaming Market on the “cheapskate Linux userbase” because they aren’t interested in the market for lame-assed First Person Shooters.

2005-07-24 1:03 pm

Erm, I paid for my software (a lot of which was pretty expensive at the time e.g. Lattice C, Professional Page etc.). And since this was before the days of file-sharing networks I suspect so did a hell of a lot of other people.

I miss my Amiga 3000. I still have it but it’s just so underpowered for what I enjoy doing now that it sits in the other room, not hooked up.

Assigns in AmigaDOS were so awesome. I swear, it’s just amazing what could be done on the Amiga vs. the PC back in the late 80s and early 90s. But once PCs got their VGA displays and Windows 95, the software for them just got better and better.

I always hoped for some company to have some business sense and finances to give the Amiga its proper place in computing. Alas, that never came to be.

Would still be nice to get a decent fully featured Amiga-like OS working on PC hardware.

Ah, I can dream.

2005-07-24 9:26 am

Check out the 20th Anniversary Bonus Pack for AmigaOS 4.0 for some nice screenshots of the current OS.

I miss my Amiga days. I started with an A500 and my last box was an A1200 with a ‘040 axel board. Damn cool computer. I look at the PC these days and laugh at how poorly designed it is, with kludges all over the place in order to support the piece of shit Microseft systems. I’m getting a Mac Mini pretty soon because it seems to be the only sane alternative theses days, Pegasos being too expensive and the PC being a piece of shit with its legacy 16bit software compat kludges.

Amiga died for the same reason that Atari, RadioShack, Texas instrument and a whole slew of lessor known pcs died. They used proprietary hardware. For whatever reason, the IBM was cloned. If IBM had held the hardware in-house, Microsoft would NOT be the powerhouse it is today. The Intel hardware standard, (formerly the IBM CLONE standard) made many choices available. Competition drove down prices (and still does). Easy Plagiarism for DOS and later Windows, made a do-it-yourself market. Very few build it yourself hardwares were available for Amiga and others. There were a few Apple and Mac kits, but without the rom, they just couldn’t make it. Only Macintosh has shown ANY ability to stay around, and that was probably because of the big school giveaway, where they influenced teachers and students.The perceived quality of Macintosh was another factor. Perhaps if Mac had adopted the open INTEL hardware standard (?) early on, Mac would have kept MicroSoft from its position of dominance.. Note that all of these point have little to do with the quality of the operating system… Microsoft was just more accessible and easy to acquire at a reasonable price. And those points are holding true TODAY for more than 10 different operating systems using the Intel style hardwares. They would ALL probably run on your current Windows pc. (Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, QNX, BEos, DrDos, FreeDOS, Plan9 and more). If I could get a copy of AmigaOS and run it on my ACER, I would have it.. Amiga, Atari, Texas Instrument and other computers just werent the economic value to me..

WHY THE AMIGA DIED ? —

Because IBM allowed its hardware to be cloned.

de jj

2005-07-24 5:39 pm

HAPPY B-DAY TO A USELESS OS

2005-07-24 6:21 pm

I started computing with an AMIGA 500. I used that machine for a very long time. It’s a tragedy that C= and other companies were not able (or interested enough) in improving that plattform.

On it’s 20th bithday all what’s left from this global player (and once leader in world market shares) are some birthday grats on the www and along some magazines.

I never thought AMIGA would end like this. Sad.

2005-07-25 12:47 am

For all of you that keep wishing for an Amiga style OS for your PC hardware should check out AROS.

Using a Amiga from 1987 (A500) to 1998 (A4000/040 with picasso videocard) at home and forced off it when the A4000 died. For a year I didn’t buy a computer after it, because there was no community like the Amiga community, Aminet, the recentless stream of creativity coming from dedicated people. Got a laptop from my work after that with windows 98 but only after I installed Red Hat 6 on it I started getting interested again in computers as home/hobby user (being a developer as occupation) and now I found a new home with linux and gnome and I’m happy again.

2005-07-25 8:11 am

It was evident from attending the US West coast AmiExpo this last weekend that we now have a powerful OS which is so close to being complete it’s quite capable of providing today what is needed in a computer, but we now have no motherboards!

It was just the opposite of what we experience two years ago at the same show where many vendors had mother boards but no one was buying them because the OS was just not as usable as today.

Hopefully we will have both by the end of the year (motherboards and an OS) and hopefully everyone will not wait for an “Amiga” to be sold in “stores”!! We need as many as possible to purchase one from our long time dealers who have hung on because of what the Amiga is to us all. We for sure know that they have not hung on for this long just for the money!

2005-07-25 3:51 pm

Happy birthday Amiga!

> It was evident from attending the US West coast

> AmiExpo this last weekend that we now have a

> powerful OS which is so close to being complete

> it’s quite capable of providing today what is

> needed in a computer, but we now have no

> motherboards!

Currently sold out, but new A1 boards will be available within 3-4 months.

2005-07-25 3:53 pm

> Currently sold out, but new A1 boards will be

> available within 3-4 months.

Sorry meant 3-4 weeks. Much better!

2005-07-25 8:11 am

My first Amiga was a 500, and I’ve had a 500+. Actually, I still have both machines, but haven’t done anything with them in years. Pure nostalgia.

The Amiga was an AMAZING machine in its prime. There was just nothing like it for the average user. And it was extremely cheap compared to other machines.

I loved the platform very much and I was always looking for software in stores. It turns out just about 98.5% of my software was bootleg as you just couldn’t get it anywhere, not even in the stores where you bought the machine [or exceedingly little].

The fact that is has reached age 20 when there has been no native hardware for it in, what?, a decade?, speaks to the robust quality of the platform.

If that had been cultivated instead of giving all the money they made from the Amiga to the PC department, there would still be a contender today.

And it was the only machine that you could ever hope to play Blazemonger on.

OS4 is being developed to be able to use memory protection, and yet still can use existing 68k apps.

2005-07-25 4:20 pm

@ nii_

AROS is open source but is still the most incomplete of three main AmigaOS-like operating systems. AROS cannot run any classic 68k or PPC software transparently. Basicly running AmigaOS 3.9 emulated on a PC is far more useful at this stage.

MorphOS 1.4x is more complete. Offers good compatibility with classic 68k and PPC software. But lacks a TCP/IP stack, includes a very limited workbench replacement (far more limited than AmigaOS3.x) and has no more commercial developer backing from Genesi but is still tied to Genesi’s hardware.

AmigaOS4 pre-release is currently the most advanced. Classic compatibility is very similar to MorphOS, but has more up to date and advanced developer tools (gcc 4.01 gdb) available, more new features implemented (native TCP stack, Warp3D, all WB features) and under development (full MP, multi-threading, SMP).

2005-07-25 3:23 pm

Happy birthday Amiga you just got 20 and live in a broad variety of flavours today.

– The “classic” approach:

Original 68k hardware tweaked to the maximun – highly geeky, less usefull

– The emulation approach:

UAE and Amithlon – both powerhorses on cheap off the shelf hardware, but limited to AmigaOS 3.x, minor speed penalty due to emulation.

– The multi architecture native approach:

AROS – a reimplementaion of the AmigaOS for several architectures. Most intersting AROS x86 since x86 are ubiquotous available and dirt cheap. Very promising approach, but lacks many thing still. Free of charge and open source.

– The “official” PPC approach:

OS4 – long, long delays, but finally there is something useful. Nice improvents and enhancements but also many lacks and issues. Worst thing: no hardware for it is available currently. Too much jingoism.

– The “inofficial” PPC approach:

MorphOS – PPC reimplematation of AmigaOS running in a box. Very fast, very compatible (68k, WarpOS, PowerUp and – limited – OS4), a lot of enhancements. Hardware available, currently free of charge.

Disadvantges: Development became a bit slow, missing native tcp/ip stack.

All in all not as dead as many ppl think. Most needed application for all flavours is a decent brower. But on other fields there many good apps available (sound, gfx, dtp).